


dishwater funnels down the drain

by bebitched



Category: The Office (US)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Retirement Home, F/M, Kid Fic, Miscarriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-21
Updated: 2013-02-21
Packaged: 2017-12-03 04:05:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/693915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bebitched/pseuds/bebitched
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a collection of au's. the ones that never happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dishwater funnels down the drain

 

 

 

 _The one where there are no cameras._  

 

She hears whispers, hushed awe through scratchy receivers from receptionist to receptionist, weaving through the proverbial grapevine of the fruit species _Dundermifflus_.

 

“They have a whole camera crew and everything”, Rolondo gushes, his cupped hand caging his breath close to the phone, “like they’re a sitcom or something _._ ”

 

Grace at corporate has a different take.

 

“It’d make me so nervous”, she admits, and Pam can almost hear the echoes off the desk she’s curled under, stocking feet tucked under her hips, “Someone watching me all the time…” she shudders audibly, “I don’t know how the people in the Buffalo branch can stand it.”

 

Pam wonders what it would be like, under a lens like some kind of studied animal. Would she feel like a movie star? Like a freak? Would Michael finally behave? What would they see that she couldn’t? All those constant questions…

 

A sting of disappointment lingers in her diaphragm, making her kick her toes lightly against the base board of her desk, a grown-up version of a loser little-leaguer scuffing his sneakers against home plate. But then again maybe-

 

Jim catches her eye across the room, gesturing a mimed homicide emphatically at Dwight, and she giggles into her curved fingers.

 

Maybe some things are best left hidden.

 

 

 

 

_The one where he lets go too soon._

 

He stays at Dunder-Mifflin for about six months, long enough to realize three things:

 

(1) the paper business is about as dull as the product they’re selling;

 

(2) there should be some sort of licensing program for num-chucks (this one is courtesy of Dwight) and;

 

(3) he finds the engaged receptionist much prettier than he has any right to.

 

He had managed to convince himself that she was as boring as the expression she wore on her face, worn down like the eraser-end of an old pencil. But then they end up chatting over soda cans and a sketch of Dwight’s head popping like a balloon, and it’s just long enough for him to realize how hugely wrong he had been.

 

She’s funny, has an eye for art, and she can kick his ass at minesweeper. He batters around the outskirts of her life for a few weeks, observing like a scientist every time her fiancé lugs himself upstairs from the warehouse. She’s too good for him, that much is obvious; he can see in the set of her shoulders, the way they hike every time Roy says something blatantly insensitive. But it’s always just long enough to catch before they deflate.

 

This is his conclusion: she’s a taken woman who believes she has exactly as much as she deserves.

 

He hands in his two weeks.

 

It nags at the back of his mind, like a prophetic dream he’s forgotten. Something important he cannot recall except in brief flashes at the shadowy corners of his subconscious. He wonders if he had stayed, whether he would have been able to continue to talk himself out of loving her. He hopes so. But it wakes him in the night in a cold sweat, makes him pause outside the restaurant where they had lunch his first day.

 

He shakes his head. There’s no point in loving someone who doesn’t love you back.

 

 

 

 

_The one where they love each other from the beginning._

 

Their beginning is marked with a Malibu Barbie, six unattached Legos, and a sandbox.

 

It was a coincidence really, they’d remark fourteen years later during a toast with champagne on a warm spring day. A happenstance meeting that tilted their lives in a different direction. Well, the same direction: towards each other.

 

(Their mothers will call it fate, but who really knows.)

 

If it had been any other boy who’d left his blocks at the playground, or any other girl who’d misplaced her doll, or if these two events had occurred on separate days, or if they had not returned at the same times, then they probably never would have met.

 

Pam was two years older, an expressly significant difference at the tender ages of nine and seven. Running in different social circles (as structured as one’s social hierarchy could be at that age), schedules that never brought them to the shared playground during the same time period, and living miles apart, statistically there was no logical reason for the two to ever take notice of each other.

 

But there was Sandy (the Barbie in question). And there were the last few Lego pieces needed to complete his six-tower dungeon. And there was the sand pit that both items were abandoned within.

 

Their eyes met over the miniature dunes and it was-

 

“Magic,” Pam will whisper into his lapel, swaying side to side as the band plays the notes of their first dance as husband and wife.

 

 

 

 

_The one where he doesn’t let go soon enough._

 

The years had not been kind to him.

 

As a graying, bitter man at the age of sixty-seven, Jim often gave the impression that he was trying to claw his way out of something tangled and ominous. At times his eyes were wide and afraid, and he would speak in a small, confused voice; but at others they would narrow into frustrated slits and his words would sour and sting.

 

(What they didn’t know was this: he was lost. He had wandered into the forest after _her_ , but it had gotten dark suddenly, so suddenly, and when he tried to turn back he discovered that his trail of breadcrumbs had been gobbled up but little woodland creatures who didn’t know any better.)

 

He worked too much, but it didn’t make him happy; so he retired, and that was even worse. He tried to take up a hobby, but he found that everything reminded him of the girl he never fell out of love with and the scars on his heart that never quite healed.

 

Bent at the back like a gnarled tree, one to be used for leaning against mid-way through a long trek but nothing more, Jim had to walk slowly and deliberately.

 

(Some said this was due to hours spent hunched in front of the computer, but others believed his heavy heart was weighing his top half to the ground.)

 

His home fell into disrepair, the paint flaked and wilting like autumn flowers and the floorboards more squeak than wood. He was lonely, but believed there was nothing to be done about it.

 

This, of course, was until the accident. They say there was a ruck in the runner on the stairs. That his hands, shoved deep into his pockets, couldn’t reach out to the banister in time to catch himself, or that maybe he just didn’t think it was worth it.

 

He was found by his sister the next day.

 

The wake is a small affair, mostly family and friends that he’d known when he was young and hopeful. Guests mill around, make small talk and cocktails, and try not to look toward the base of the stairs.

 

A head of ginger and grey at the temples slides into the room, the scuffed gold on her finger not bothering to catch the light.

 

She speaks to the stone marking of his grave as if he can hear her though her husband, his voice almost meek, tells her it’s foolish. When she’s accompanied by her growing family she explains with a forced smile what a good friend he was, how he could always cheer her up. But alone she whispers that she’s sorry, so sorry. That she did love him, but that lies choked her and fear blinded her, and she didn’t realize how much until after it was too late.

 

Later, the feet of Pam’s grandchildren will pitter-patter across his grave, leaving muddy footprints in the scraggy green shadow of his tombstone, and the wind will refuse to blow.

 

 

 

 

_The one where everything is backwards._

 

Her name is Rachel.

 

Pam would like to say that she’s a bitch, that she kicks puppies and plucks lollipops right out of the plump fingers of small children. That she doesn’t deserve Jim.

 

But that isn’t true, or at least not exactly. Rachel is kind and warm-hearted, and there are moments when she throws her head back in laughter and Pam knows instantly what he sees in her.

 

But she’s also a bit too conventional. Focused on the _should_ s of life. Not quite simple-minded but close. Rachel doesn’t understand his preoccupation with pranks, thinks they’re silly and waits for Jim to ‘outgrow’ them, as if someday he’ll shed his skin like a snake and the new him will be diligent and serious in his work. Pam notices the friction (she watches him closely enough) that Rachel’s pressure and Jim’s reluctance causes between the two.

 

So, when Pam says that she thinks the sandy-haired woman should just give back the ring he proposed with the night of their college graduation and put the whole thing to bed, her reasons aren’t entirely selfish.

 

But it also has a lot to do with the fact that she’s completely in love with him.

 

Her mom will ask her sometimes: _Why don’t you just give up?_ _Why not move on? Find a job far away, where their relationship isn’t shoved in your face. Every. Single. Day._

 

The answer is a simple one, but perhaps one that might not seem as clear to her mom, who never had to risk more than a flutter of her eyelashes and a coy ‘yes’ in her day.

 

Because she’d rather love him from afar than to not have him in her life at all.

 

There are times when she feels pathetic. Particularly every evening when Rachel jogs on over from her own office in the same business park to retrieve Jim. Her arms will wrap around his broad shoulders, hands dangling over his keyboard, and his eyes will close for one brief moment, before he spins in his chair and pecks her on the cheek.

 

It would be easier if she knew he wasn’t still in love with her.

 

Pam’s had her share of boyfriends. A former football player from a rival to her old high school. A transfer salesman with a foreign sounding name that liked her a bit too much not to get hurt. And, yeah, sometimes she’ll bring them by the office just to see if Jim reacts. Something, _anything_. If she strikes the situation enough, will he finally spark?

 

There some moments when she thinks he does – his jaw will clench, or his fingers twitch into a fist – but then the fire is smothered under waves of apathy and she loses hope all over again.

 

This can’t go on forever; she knows this. Rachel might continue to push the wedding date further and further into the recesses of future calendars, but some day she won’t. A date will stick, and Pam will have to deal with that.

 

But for now she waits, and it will have to be enough.

 

 

 

 

_The one where time does not bend._

 

Jim scuffs his dusty sneakers on the welcome mat, following Dan inside at a distance because his friend won’t stop swinging that baseball bat every which way. They lost the game, but only by one home run; they’re improving.

 

He tosses the baseball between his two, open hands. The dirt caught in the grooves and stitching has turned the previously pristine leather the auburn color of the diamond down the street.

 

Dan’s house isn’t like his. It’s slightly smaller, but every cranny is full of interesting knick-knacks, things of no use except to be superiorly fascinating. Oddly-shaped glass bottles sit in the panes of the front window, pitching light of every color onto the carpet and against the opposite wall. None of the armchairs scattered around the house match at all, but he’d hazard a guess and say they each have a story, passed down from relatives or over from flea markets.

 

But it’s the wall of pictures that intrigues him the most. Just across the room, a long hallway veering off to the rest of the house is plastered ceiling to waist-level with framed photographs. Jim strolls over, listening to Dan rattling away in the kitchen, trying to scrounge up some lemonade and a snack. His eyes travel row upon row of browning black and white photos, a few standing out in a modern greenish red. Family members marry and ride bikes and go to prom and are born at different spots; faces framed with Dan’s familiar curly hair peer out at him from the past.

 

One in particular catches his eye. It’s one of the older prints, fading fast and blotched with age. The woman stares down the camera, standing in front of a wooden shack and miles of dusty farmland. He touches a grubby finger to her sepia-toned face, unsmiling and tired.

 

“That’s my Great-Aunt.” Dan’s voice startles him, drawing him from his total absorption in the photo, but he plays it off with a cough. He hands Jim a tall glass of juice and a Twinkie package.

 

“Huh,” he grunts, trying to sound uncaring but failing miserably. “What was she like?”

 

“She was a painter,” Dan gestures over to a hung frame in the living room, a landscape of the sandy, windswept plains of the dust bowl. Jim takes note of the smaller, surrounding pieces, and recognizes the same artist’s hand in each. They’re mostly ordinary, out-dated tools and long-dead faces, but Jim recognizes vibrancy, a dedication there, that reaches beyond the subjects.

 

“My mom says she was pretty amazing. She lived through the depression and managed our family’s farm out west when there was no more work in the city. She ended up moving back when she got older though. She never had any kids or anything. Both her and my grandma were born in Pennsylvania in the early twenties. She died when I was six, so I don’t remember her much.”

 

Dan shrugs, fisting his hands inside his pockets and hiking his shoulders up to his ears.

 

“What was her name?” he asks, his tone soft but urgent, a curious sensation choking up his vocal chords.

 

“Pam.” He confirms with a deft nod, “Pam Beesly.”

 

 

 

 

_The one where late is better than never._

 

“Don’t look now, but your roommate is giving you the evil eye.”

 

Jim’s head turns just slightly to the left, enough to make the disembodied voice tut in disapproval. But it’s also just enough to catch the man with whom who he’ll be sharing a small cottage imminently creeping into the patch of grass that passes for a backyard, his round glasses flashing in the Florida sun. He just knew this retirement community was a bad idea.

 

“God, is that you?”

 

A brilliant laugh echoes over the front porch, and a small woman steps into his eye line, seemingly out of the bushes. Her sugared ginger hair falls in soft waves over her shoulder and is tucked neatly behind her ears. The fanned creases around her eyes and in the corners of her lips contract as she smiles at him.

 

“Yes, in fact, and God now goes by Pam.” She stretches out a hand. “I’m your new neighbor.”

 

His large palm envelops her much smaller one and he’s surprised by the electricity he can feel where their skin meets. Her grin widens. “Jim Halpert.”

 

From that day forward he sets out to learn everything about her. Where she grew up. (Scranton, surprisingly, not too far from where his parents lived before they passed away.) What she does in all her spare time. (She holds up her paint-stained hands in answer.) Her favorite flavor of yogurt. (Mixed berry, of course.) The best way to make her laugh. (Putting his roommate’s dentures in jello is always a safe bet.) The feel of her bottom lip between his and the splay of her hair against her pillow in the morning. (Perfect, always.)

 

Pam’s roommate gives him a disapproving look as he shuffles around their kitchen in the morning, brewing the first pot of coffee. But he shoots her a sly grin instead of being offended at the way she clutches her cross in his presence.

 

(Besides, it’s not like he’s missed the creaking sounds of her slipping out and sneaking across the street to keep his own roommate company when Jim stays over.)

 

And even though she still has a wedding day portrait of her and her long deceased husband sitting on her mantle, he never feels like he’s intruding on someone else’s marriage. She doesn’t act ashamed that she was married before, or shy away from questions about him. Her eyes are slightly sad as she tells him how she was widowed at forty and how, even though she was still relatively young, she never really felt the motivation to try love again. Until him, of course.

 

He spends all of his days holding her hand or watching her paint with wonder, and most of his nights pressed tight beside her. It’s strange; he’d always thought the phrase “golden years” was a crock pot of shit, but this is the happiest he’s ever been.

 

 

 

 

_The one where everything falls apart._

 

The honeymoon stage doesn’t last.

 

She loses the baby in December. The snow is waist high and dirty as he stares out of the car window, the car humming idly in the hospital parking lot as they wonder where to go from there. When they get home and she sees the living room lit up with Christmas lights and shiny wrapping paper and hope from such a short time ago but that seems so very far away, she bursts into tears.

 

He tries to remind her gently, always gently, that they can always try again, as she lays unmoving for days under the covers of their bed. But that makes things worse. So he tries to rid the house of any reminders, packing ultrasounds and baby booties into a cardboard box to leave in his parent’s spare bedroom for safe keeping, knowing she’ll want them, someday. But that only makes her cry harder.

 

The distance between them grows steadily.

 

He tries; he wants to make her feel better, to return them to the way they were before. Not to forget, exactly, but to move on. It hurts to see her stuck wallowing in misery and unexplainable guilt. He just doesn’t know how.

 

Dunder-Mifflin goes under a few days after the new year, taking all the branches down with it, like a mighty tree falling in the forest with thousands of people around to hear it.

 

They’ve got a meager savings account stashed away, but not enough to last for any length of time. The severance pay is nearly nothing, not from a company that was in debt to begin with and is currently being picked apart like vultures with flesh and entrails by shareholders. He’s never felt more alone as he sits at the dining room table at night, a small overhead lamp shining yellowed light on stacks of bills.

 

It’s on a nasty day in March, trees thrashing in violent wind and rain pelting the window panes, that she rises, arms wrapped tight around her middle and skin flushed, like the pink flesh revealed under healed scars.

 

She shuffles into her painting studio and doesn’t emerge until the wee hours of the next morning, covered in paint splatters and face as blank as ever. The pattern repeats, her occupied with her art and him locked on the outside, the tie around his neck as he leaves looking for work each morning feeling like a noose. It isn’t until he glimpses her finished canvases, by far her best work, that he realizes she’s found her coping strategy, her solace, and it isn’t with him.

 

He finds a new job in April, someplace hip and surprisingly doing well, despite the economy. It isn’t what he _knows_ though, and he has to work more hours on more days of the week to prove himself. Most days it feels like he’s sinking. She goes to stay with her mother, _to get some perspective_ , she tells him in a scratchy, underused voice.

 

The divorce papers arrive in June, and he can’t bring himself to be surprised.

 

 

 

 

_The one where she can fly._

 

Maybe he didn’t need Pam’s umbrella. Maybe it wasn’t so much a lie; more like tweaked details from his past.

 

“Jim.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

“We’re levitating.”

 

 “Yep. How about that.”

 

 

 

_The one where they never even love at all._

 

Pam is thirty-six and sick. If asked to pinpoint exactly what she was sick with (or maybe, more aptly, _of_ ) she probably couldn’t tell you. Life, maybe. Life’s little sink holes and the way it always, _always_ , goes on. Even when you just want to dig your heels in, leaving boot prints in the sands of time, and make it just _slow the fuck down_.

 

Her shoes subconsciously press further into the grubby flooring of the subway car as she takes the train home from work. A newspaper crossword lies abandoned in her lap; most of the white boxes are blank and the others imprison scribbles tangled around wrong answers. She used to work through them like lightening but she finds concentration a rare commodity these days, along with hope and spirit, and the small pleasures have likewise gone by the wayside.

 

She knows she should probably stop trying, stop folding the morning paper into a cryptic square and trying to find obscure words when even the simplest ones ( _hello_ , _fine, help_ ) are difficult to come by these days. The failure of those little white boxes make her ache something awful, almost as much as the failure of those little blue pills, but she can’t give up on the notion that someday something unexpected will spark the fire inside her and it will all come back to her.

 

(If it isn’t obvious in context, she’s not really talking about the crossword anymore.)

 

The crowd pushes in on her as they near her stop, and it’s on days like these that she wishes she’d never moved to New York, that she’d stayed in Scranton where the world was small and sleepy and she knew her place in it. But she’d needed a change, she’d told herself, placing her life carefully into cardboard and bubble wrap and shipping it ahead of her. Well, change was what she got.

 

Pam waits until almost the last minute to slip through the exit, hoping to beat the crowd both incoming and outgoing, and gets knocked in the shoulder for her trouble.

 

“Sorry,” they both mutter in synchronicity, and Pam almost _almost_ doesn’t glance up. But there’s a tug and a whistle and her eyes meet those of the tall stranger.

 

His hair is carefully mussed, the corporate cut in disarray, as if he had stumbled upon the crisp clean look on accident and his hair had taken it upon itself to rectify the mistake. His eyes are hazel and kind, and she nearly says _wait; I know you._ But that would be a lie, a blatant one, because she couldn’t place him if her life depended on it, and they’re already drifting. They slide past each other like passing ships and the door closes behind him.

 

He’s already looked back down at his folded newspaper by the time the train glides away.

 

 

 

 

_The one where it’s not their turn._

 

They meet on a Wednesday.

 

It’s her first day there, and when his boss introduces her to the office, he remarks to himself that she’s probably the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. And it’s not just that. It’s the way her eyes are always smiling from beneath a fan of thick eyelashes, and that she laughs at his jokes with this little snort that’s cute as hell.

 

He asks her out the same day.

 

The waiter seats them and they settle into a conversation like they’d known each other for years. She’s an artsy type and he’s never really cared about his job, so they hatch escape plans and an elaborate bank heist that dissolves into a fit of giggles. He can’t get enough of her, the way she looks him straight in the eye and how she challenges him, joke for joke.

 

Their meal comes and they almost choke trying to talk and eat at the same time, but he doesn’t mind the slight indigestion if she keeps pursing her lips and making him laugh deep from his belly.

 

“So what do your parents do?” He questions after the plates have been cleared and she’s perusing the desert menu. They’ve already traded college stories and they both know they’re only children. Sipping his water, he leans back into his chair.

 

“Oh, well, my mom is receptionist too.” She glances up at him over the list, and his stomach does flip-flops over the thought that maybe she’d done it just to take another look at him. “And my dad used to be a warehouse worker. They still live in Scranton, in that same house they moved into after they got engaged.” There’s an undercurrent of bitterness, he wants to say, there in her words, but he doesn’t know why that would be.

 

Then he gives a little start.

 

“Scranton? That’s a coincidence; my dad’s from there originally. My parents met in Stamford and then moved to New York. I was raised here.” His mom still lives in the city, but after they got divorced when he was nineteen his dad transferred out to Boston. He doesn’t say this, but the compulsion to spill out his soul at her feet nudges the words to the tip of his tongue.

 

Her lips twist into a funny little smile, and he suddenly wants to paint a detailed portrait of those two lips, using every shade of pink and red on his palate. And he _sucks_ at art, so that should tell you something.

 

When they leave the restaurant the humid summer air hits them like a tsunami wave. The city skyline is distorted to abstract blocks of shadow against the pleasantly glowing purple of the evening sky, and her white, eyelet dress is dyed blue in the light. 

 

He walks her back to her apartment, four blocks away, her new graphic design classes at NYU the topic of conversation. She reminds them both that she’s only twenty-two, so she’s got a little time to waste at the computer corporation that employs the two of them.

 

“I need money and it’s a job. And I’ve got a position in California lined up for when I graduate so it’s only temporary.”

 

His heart drops into his stomach, already worrying over implications, but then she kisses him as the sun makes its final bow of farewell. He wonders how she didn’t miss, how she found him in the dark. Her hand remains resting on his chest as she bites her lip, and he falls a little in love with the fact that she’s the one who kissed him first.

 

He’s still looking at her like that as she murmurs, “You know, they need computer techs everywhere. Even in California.”

 

And he wonders how long he’s been so transparent as she turns to stroll further down the sidewalk, skipping a little.

 

But then she turns and holds out her hand. “Coming?”

 

When he feels the life line on her palm sliding against his, he knows this is the beginning of something big.

 

 

 

_The one where fate is kind and love is new._

 

There is a boy. And then there is a girl.

 

She is shy and freckled and hiding a cacophony of vibrancy inside of her, like the plain white shell of an egg.

 

He is gangly and agreeable and looking for something he’s convinced he will know when he spies it.

 

The exact manner in which they meet doesn’t matter, only that they do, and that nothing will ever be the same again.

 

They don’t speak in riddles, or cloak nearly-forgotten lovers, or share in a half-mutual unrequited love.

 

The ride is easy. The words are plush and true. The touch of skin is absolute.

 

He finds what he’s been searching for in the curl of her arms.

 

She discovers a crack in her self-imposed husk with his help.

 

There is still a boy and there is still a girl, but together they are more than they once were.

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
